Fredrik chats with Chris Ferdinandi about vanilla Javascript, the pros and cons of libraries, the state of web components, and a lot more.

Chris tells us about how and why he became the vanilla Javascript guy, and why he dislikes vanilla-js.com. We talk about why we as web developers pick up so many libraries, and why we often seem to use really large tools on really small problems. We wonder if different types of developers should think in different ways about libraries. Chris also talks about how different groups attending his courses approach the subject of vanilla Javascript in different ways, and of course a bit about where he hopes and thinks web development might be heading in the next few years.

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• Chris Ferdinandi
• Vanilla Javascript
• Vanilla JS podcast - Chris' podcast
• Chris' newsletter
• gomakethings.com
• Jquery
• vanilla-js.com - a joke which may not have stood the test of time
• Library or framework?
• ES 5
• Post from Dave Rupert about ripping Jquery out of Wordpress
• Chris' e-books
• vanillajsguides.com
• Chris' workshops
• DOM diffing
• Dan Abramov
• Redux
• Dan Abramov’s course on Redux
• Vue
• Svelte
• Astro
• The stage 3 API for passing in a string of HTML and sanitizing it
• JSX
• Details and summary elements
• ARIA
• Web components
• Chris' course on web components
• Shadow DOM
• Constructable stylesheets

• I help people learn vanilla Javascript
• Largely because of Jquery
• The vanilla JS guy
• The phrase “at scale” gets thrown in there
• Trying to hang a painting on your wall with a sledgehammer
• Perfect for a very narrow and specific set of use cases
• Just throwing one more of them in
• The pain of their own tech choices
• Teaching engineers how to find their next job
• I didn’t realize you could do so much without a library
• Underneath your libary
• Without punishing the user
• Mostly HTML and a little bit of Javascript
• Waiting for the build to compile
• You never have to feel bored